Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Building Pages Based on a Template

Building a template is only a prelude to the actual work of building your site. Once you finish your template, it’s time to produce pages.

To create a new document based on a template, choose File→New to open the New Document window (see Figure 19-5). Click the “Page from Template” button, and then, from the Site list, select the site you’re working on. All the templates for that site appear in the right-hand column. Select the template you wish to use, and then click Create.

Figure 19-5. The Page From Template category of the New Document window lets you build new pages based on a template. Be careful of the middle “Site” column. It lets you pick any site that you’ve set up in Dreamweaver and open a new page based on a template from that site. It’s a bad idea to pick a site other than the one you’re working on. In fact, if you do, Dreamweaver doesn’t bring along any of the assets of that template (for example, style sheets, images, linked-to pages, and so on) so you’ll end up with a broken template-based page. Why, Adobe, why?

Note

If you don’t want your new web page linked to a template (so that future changes to the template won’t affect this page), turn off the “Update page when template changes” checkbox. The result is a new page that looks just like the template, but has no locked regions; you can edit the entire page. This is a useful technique ...